A 9-year-old boy won a competition and has named a near-Earth asteroid Bennu. NASA will soon be visiting the asteroid.
A North Carolina third-grader named Michael Puzio beat more than 8,000 other entries in an international student contest that sought to rename potentially dangerous asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36. His name choice, "Bennu", was chosen among all entries, and "Bennu" will be visited by NASA in 2018.
"It's great!" Puzio said when told he won the contest. "I'm the first kid I know that named part of the solar system!"
The asteroid now shares its name with an Egyptian god usually depicted as a gray heron. According to a contest official, the boy revealed that he chose the name because he thought Osiris-Rex's Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism arm (TAGSAM) and solar panels looked like Bennu's neck and wings.
"The name 'Bennu' struck a chord with many of us right away," Bruce Betts, director of projects for the nonprofit Planetary Society and a judge in the competition, said in a statement. "While there were many great entries, the similarity between the image of the heron and the TAGSAM arm of Osiris-Rex was a clever choice."
The Osiris-Rex mission is reportedly worth $800 million and will begin September 2016, reaching Bennu in 2018. The spacecraft will reportedly return to Earth 2023 with pieces of the space rock for analysis. Scientists have for a very long time wanted to study such space rock samples, as asteroids are said to be made of materials left over from the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.
"The samples of Bennu returned by Osiris-Rex will allow scientists to peer into the origin of the solar system and gain insights into the origin of life," Jason Dworkin, an Osiris-Rex project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.
Bennu is known to be a hazardous asteroid which has a very good change of hitting Earth in 2182. This is one of the reasons why scientists are even more curious to study samples from this asteroid.
